Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. Later a Jansenist scholar, he wrote two classics of French devotional thought, the Lettres Provinciales 1656–57,) directed against the casuistry of the Jesuits, and Pensées (1670,) a defense of Christianity.
Born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Pascal was the son of a venerated mathematician and a local bureaucrat. Early in life, Pascal proved that he was a prodigy by discovering Euclid’s first 23 propositions for himself at the age of 11. Pascal’s work contains his famous theorem on a hexagram inscribed in a conic.
While only 17, Pascal published an essay on mathematics that René Descartes refused to recognize as being the work of a teen. Pascal produced (1642–44) a calculating device to aid his father in his local administration; Gottfried Leibniz later simplified it.
With Pierre de Fermat, Pascal laid the foundations of the mathematical system of probability. He also contributed to calculus and hydrodynamics, devising Pascal’s Law in 1647. He developed the hydraulic press, the barometer, and the syringe and published his work on vacuums in 1647. The SI unit of pressure is named after him.
In 1646, Pascal converted to Jansenism, and religion became progressively dominant in his life, culminating in him joining the Jansenist retreat at Port-royal Des Champs in 1655. There, Pascal disseminated a religious doctrine that clarified the experience of God through the heart instead of through reason. The establishment of his belief of intuitionism had a bearing on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and on the Existentialists.
Pascal’s notes for a casebook of Christian truths were found after his death and published as the Pensées in 1669. They contain intense perceptions of religious truths coupled with a suspicion of rationalist thought and theology.
Notable biographies of Pascal include Jean Mesnard’s Pascal: His Life and Works (1951; trans. 1952) and Ernest Mortimer’s Blaise Pascal: The Life and Work of a Realist (1959.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Blaise Pascal
We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good; and it is well to accustom ourselves to profit by the evil which is so common, while that which is good is so rare.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Evils, Evil
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Philosophy
The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Heart, Instincts
The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Past, Future, The Present, The Past
The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Perfection, Words
By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality (which is the science, by way of eminence, of living well and being happy), but all mankind together is making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older. So that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man who never ceases to live and learn.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Progress
The heart has reasons that the reason does not know.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Heart, Reason
We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Life and Living
The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Reason
All men have happiness as their object: there are no exceptions. However different the means they employ, they aim at the same end.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Happiness, Being Ourselves
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
—Blaise Pascal
The future, only, is our goal.—We are never living, but only hoping to live; and looking forward always to being happy, it is inevitable that we never are so.
—Blaise Pascal
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
—Blaise Pascal
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Freedom
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Faith, Belief, Doubt
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: One liners, Philosophy
All mankind’s unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Unhappiness, Happiness
One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Names
Do you wish men to speak well of you? Then never speak well of yourself.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Self-Discovery, Egotism
Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Christian
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Feelings, Love
No man is so happy as the real Christian; none so rational, so virtuous, so amiable. How little vanity does he feel, though he believes himself united to God! How far is he from abjectness, though he ranks himself with the worms of the earth.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Christian
Losses are comparative, imagination only makes them of any moment.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Mistakes, Failures
There are only three types of people; those who have found God and serve him; those who have not found God and seek him, and those who live not seeking, or finding him. The first are rational and happy; the second unhappy and rational, and the third foolish and unhappy.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: People, Unhappiness
Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Happiness
Habit is the second nature which destroys the first.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Habits, Habit
Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Desires, Desire
No soul of high estate can take pleasure in slander. It betrays a weakness.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Betrayal
When we meet with a natural style we are surprised and delighted, for we expected to find an author, and have found a man.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Style
Fashion is a tyrant from which nothing frees us.—We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes.—But being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep them.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Fashion
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